Living Outside The Box

The reason to do all this is about working to pioneer new methods to save the world - one ocean plankton bloom, one forest, not one discovery at a time. All at once.
This blog and my lifes work is dedicated to my 3 children and 2 grandchildren and yours too...and to mysteries of nature some discovered most not.

Goggle which is one of the world’s largest corporations and leader in environmentally friendly corporate behaviour had its best Google engineers study the potential for renewable energy to help solve the crisis of fossil fuel energy and it’s CO2 emissions. The result is a stark report that says that contrary to the hype about renewable energy that even if fully developed to their best potential they offer far less than is required to be an effective antidote to fossil CO2.

Beginning in 2007, Google started investing billions to mitigate its contribution to the world’s climate and energy problems. It made its work places and server farms some of the most energy-efficient in the world, purchased as much renewable energy as it could, and offset what remained of its carbon footprint with carbon credit projects. The PR effect of these actions proved to be great.

Google’s took things one step further in an impressive move known as RE<C, (Renewable Energy at a cost cheaper than coal) which as a google sized investment fund aimed to develop renewable energy sources. Google said it would help promising technologies mature by investing in start-ups and conducting its own internal R&D. It hoped to produce a gigawatt of renewable power more cheaply than a coal-fired plant could, and to achieve this in years, not decades.

By 2011 the engineers and investment managers at RC<C had shown that in spite of their best efforts they had failed to meet intended targets and the initiative was quietly put into the closet. Google had discovered at a cost a scores of millions that renewable energy hype doesn’t come anywhere near reality in what it can deliver.

The top engineers who ran RE<C, have been widely quoted as saying, “we had shared the attitude of many stalwart environmentalists: We felt that with steady improvements to today’s renewable energy technologies, our society could stave off catastrophic climate change. We now know that to be a false hope—but that doesn’t mean the planet is doomed.”

Alfred Spector, Google’s vice president of research, asked the RC<C engineering team to reflect on the project, examine its underlying assumptions, and learn from its failures.

The Google engineers quickly found a 2008 paper by James Hansen [PDF], former director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and one of the world’s foremost experts on climate change. In that paper Hansen showed the true calamitous global CO2/climate situation. Hansen set out to determine, via a complex climate society model, what level of atmospheric CO2 society should aim for “if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted.” His model(s) showed that exceeding 350 parts per million CO2 in the atmosphere would likely have catastrophic effects.

Mauna Loa CO2 levels Jan 2014-Jan 2015

We’ve already blown past that limit. Today, environmental monitoring shows concentrations around 400 ppm. That’s especially problematic say the Google engineers because CO2 remains in the atmosphere for more than a century; even if we shut down every fossil-fueled power plant today, existing CO2 already emitted, yesterdays CO2, will continue to warm the planet, acidify the oceans, and exacerbate many other changes to the planet’s ecosystem.

Not only had RE<C failed to reach its goal of discovering, promoting, or creating energy cheaper than coal, but they showed that their goal had not been ambitious enough to make a meaningful contribution to slowing let alone reversing climate change.

What Google concluded are that a mix of everything has to be focused on the crisis of CO2. We must have reliable zero-carbon energy sources so cheap that the operators of power plants and industrial facilities alike have an economic rationale for switching over soon—say, within the next 40 years. Let’s face it Goggle says, businesses won’t make sacrifices and pay more for clean energy based on altruism alone. Instead, society and their bankster overlords need solutions that appeal to their profit motives.

So what Google has discovered is that if the mantra for saving the world is “make money, save a little world on the side” the world is going to go to hell in a handbasket.

However if the mantra is reversed and becomes “save the world, make a little money on the side” the world can actually be saved.

Google head Eric Schmidt’s 200 ft long mega-yacht

It’s pretty clear that the head of Google Eric Schmidt might not be able to still own his two super yachts while following the latter mantra; or that the sport of who can become the richest man in the world game can still be played by Sergey and Larry. But hey guys, saving the world is just as fun. You know how it goes with doing good work, “money for nuthin’ and the chicks for free”! Please lend a hand.

Just so Mr. Schmidt knows he’s not alone in his passion for mega-yachts here’s photos of Microsoft founder Paul Allen’s yacht which if you click on the photo you will see is way bigger than Erics,

and Steve Jobs had one too which is way snazzier than either of the two.

A review of Google’s gloomy engineers report summarizes what the report says,

“Even if one were to electrify all of transport, industry, heating and so on, so much renewable generation and balancing/storage equipment would be needed to power it that astronomical new requirements for steel, concrete, copper, glass, carbon fibre, neodymium, shipping and haulage etc etc would appear.

All these things are made using mammoth amounts of energy: far from achieving massive energy savings, which most plans for a renewables future rely on implicitly, we would wind up needing far more energy, which would mean even more vast renewables farms – and even more materials and energy to make and maintain them and so on.

The scale of the building would be like nothing ever attempted by the human race.”

Now as for the what will save us.

Google has proven to itself that all of its billions and renewable energy cannot save us while still making a profit and that it is the expectation of profits first environment second that is the plague and reality of human society. What they do touch on in the report is one incredibly important fact.

This is that the amount of CO2 already emitted into the air is effectively a lethal dose for the environment as we have become accustomed to and are comforted by. It won’t be sufficient they note to even curtail our energy use by a whopping 55% globally which they say is an impossible expectation. And they warn that the time frame for the CO2 already emitted into the air, yesterday’s CO2, to destroy the global environment is a mere hundred years or less.

The Google engineers do not offer an antidote but instead bemuse that an unknown something needs to be done, unobtanium must be found in abundance and indeed invented and engineered. It must both act as the antidote for the first lethal dose of yesterday’s CO2 already emitted into the air. And it must also serve to become some new form of perfectly non-polluting energy source that arrives almost immediately and deploys even faster IF we are to avoid sending a second lethal dose of CO2 into the world’s air and oceans.

First off the problem of that hypothetical Google engineering antidote is that it has to follow the known laws of chemistry and physics. The 2nd law of thermodynamics states that it takes as much energy to drive a reaction in reverse as it does to drive it forward. In the case of yesterday’s CO2 the energy consumed driving us forward to the brink of the apocalypse that we the Google engineers say we most certainly find ourselves at today is equal to the entire amount of energy burned in the last 100 years of the fossil fuel age. Just where we might find that amount of energy to power up the CO2 monster in reverse is one that engineers are clearly unable to envision. It seems to be an impossible amount of energy to come by let alone come by as clean non polluting energy.

So Dear Engineers at Google and elsewhere, Listen up to some biological basics.

That total energy burned and fumed as CO2 into our natural world over the past 100 years. It’s a fraction of the energy available to us courtesy of green plant driven photosynthesis in the blue part that makes of 72% of this planet. You know the oceans! It’s where the rich guys keep their megayacht castles.

Even better Mother Nature with just a tiny bit of our help can help us can be saved from falling off that deadly CO2 apocalyptic precipice we have forced her (and us) to the brink of. This can be immediately deployed as ocean pasture replenishment and restoration.

ONLY ocean photosynthesis of all known or imagines sources of energy is available to become the antidote to yesterday’s lethal dose of CO2.

And as a bonus replenished and restored ocean photosynthesis can additionally make the largest possible contribution to intercepting new CO2 that is being emitted today and in all of our fossil fuel tomorrows and preventing that CO2 from becoming certain acid death in our oceans and instead become ocean life.

Best of all the cost is just pennies to help the ocean pastures repurpose billions of tons of CO2 into ocean life as opposed to seeing that CO2 become ocean acidifying death. The engineering cost of saving the world from climate change is widely reported to be trillions of dollars based on a charge per ton of CO2 engineered to be safe. The cost to employ simple immediate ocean pasture stewardship is just one penny per ton.

This is not mere hypothetical musing or even a preliminary engineering plan but rather a clearly demonstrated fact. I have begun with my first and the worlds largest ocean pasture replenishment and restoration project in 2012 in the NE Pacific.

IT JUST WORKS, to throw Google a phrase coined by their arch-enemy the late Steve Jobs.

AS FOR TOMORROWS REVOLUTIONARY CLEAN GREEN ENERGY well that is quite simply cold fusion. This site Atom-Ecology is all about cold fusion so that is a good place to begin. Enjoy. Do something more than just being a spectator. Write to the GoggleGozillionaires and beg them to spend a small fraction of what they spend on their toys and leisure on the right mantra.

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Interesting Snippets

"There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such trifling investment of fact." Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi

"It's like religion. Heresy in science is thought of as a bad thing, whereas it should be just the opposite." - Thomas Gold

Unnamed Law: If it happens, it must be possible.

" If you steal from one person, well they call that plagarism. I steal from everyone, they call that research. - Woody Guthrie

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. - Arthur C. Clarke's First Law

It is through science that we prove, but through intuition that we discover. - H. Poincare

"Nothing is too wonderful to be true if it be consistent with the laws of nature." - Michael Faraday

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it. - Max Planck

Corollary: Science advances funeral by funeral.

A man with a new idea is a crank until he succeeds. - Mark Twain

Never attribute to conspiracy that which is adequately explained by stupidity. - R. George

Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are that good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats. - Howard Aiken

I am tired of all this sort of thing called science here ... We have spent millions in that sort of thing for the last few years, and it is time it should be stopped. - U.S. Senator Simon Cameron, on the Smithsonian Institute (1901)

The one who says it cannot be done should never interrupt the one who's doing it! The Roman Rule

"I never make predictions, especially about the future" - Casey Stengle